Common Ground: House Divided, House United

September 2005

House Divided, House United

Five Bay Area activists talk about kids, work, and the tricky business of parenting while saving the world.

by Traci Hukill

It’s telling that Medea Benjamin, the powerhouse behind Global Exchange and Code Pink and the First Lady of the American anti-war movement, prefers telephone interviews so she can multitask while talking. Benjamin maintains a ferocious pace, and given the subject of the interview — parenting as an activist — I am acutely aware of how tight her schedule is, and I wonder how her kids fit into it.

Face time is always better, and I luck out and catch up with Benjamin in Carmel, where she is hawking her new edited volume of essays, Stop The Next War Now. At 52, she is tiny and golden, with limpid hazel eyes and a precisely curved mouth. As the last person leaves the room and an assistant boxes up the leftover books, Benjamin sits sideways on a folding chair, wearing an expression of sorrowful attention — or maybe it’s just fatigue — at odds with her usual fiery public persona. She talks with surprising candor about her relationship with her daughters Arlen, 24, and Maya, 14.

“It has been a juggling act, and I haven’t been juggling well,” she says.

With Arlen, a law school student who is spending the summer in Cambodia studying human rights issues, things are fine and have been since she was a teenager, when she started to appreciate her parents’ work for social justice. “She’s like a colleague at this point,” Benjamin says. She calls Arlen for technical assistance with her computer; Arlen emails her for help interpreting global developments.

But Maya is a different case. “There is a very problematic relationship,” Benjamin concedes, “because I haven’t been around much.”

Two years ago, when Maya asked when they would be able to spend some time together, Benjamin whipped out her planner, to which Maya responded with a flash of indignation, declaring that this was abnormal and unacceptable.

“She said ‘Wait a minute! Does Zoe’s mom have to schedule time with Zoe?’” Benjamin recalls.

Care, Compassion, and Questioning Authority

Her telling of the story is straightforward, almost stoic, not at all tormented or apologetic. It conforms to the activist’s compulsion to do rather than dwell upon. But Benjamin volunteers that her pragmatism, honed during an early stint with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, has had another consequence for her family.

“I’m a nutritionist by training, and I have had kids dying in my arms,” she says, “so it creates tension with being a mother in a privileged family, a privileged community, a privileged country. I’m not super tolerant of some of the things kids go through.

“Lucky for my kids,” she says with a barely rueful smile, “they have Kevin.”

That’s Kevin Danaher, Global Exchange co-founder and Benjamin’s husband of 21 years. He estimates his wife is away from home 50 percent of the time, leaving him the primary parent in their Noe Valley home.

“It’s good because kids like to play their parents off each other,” Danaher says when we talk at Global Exchange headquarters in the Mission. “This enables them to interact one on one, so it’s real good role modeling. I’m showing Maya how to kick, how to protect herself — that’s something my wife is not going to do.”

Like Benjamin, Danaher was already an activist when his kids came along, but their arrival changed the quality of his work. “It made politics more deeply rooted,” he says. And he knows it runs the other way: that children take lessons from their parents’ lives. Growing up listening to his father—a working-class Irish immigrant with a third-grade education—tell stories about thuggish British soldiers, left an indelible impression on Danaher. He was 16 when his father died, just weeks shy of retiring from his job as a bus driver.

“I didn’t come to my critique of capitalism via Marx,” he says. “I arrived at it via my dad.”

The imposing Danaher, 54, is tall and bald, with a white goatee and a deep, resonant voice. So it’s amusing to hear him describe himself as a mother.

“You don’t need a uterus to be a mother,” he says. “It’s about care and compassion and allowing your child to question authority by working it out on you.”

Easier said than done. To a progressive activist parent, a rebellious child is one who embraces the establishment. That is a heartbreak Benjamin has experienced, not with either of her daughters but with one of the many surrogate children who have come through the door of Global Exchange hoping to change the world.

Marla Ruzicka, the 28-year-old activist whose death in a suicide bombing in Iraq in April gained national media attention, was once Benjamin’s star pupil. She lived with Benjamin and Danaher for over a year, learning the patented Global Exchange techniques of civil disobedience, shouting down politicians and once even mooning President George W. Bush (she was wearing panties that read “Public Power Now”). She called Benjamin “Mom.”

But Ruzicka defected, one might say, on a Global Exchange-sponsored visit to Afghanistan in late 2001. Instead of returning to San Francisco, she decided to stay and embark on a quest to secure U.S. compensation for war victims. In the process, she began cooperating with the military and Washington politicians, including Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). She was working from inside the system rather than from outside it, as Global Exchange always had, and Benjamin felt deeply betrayed.

“It was very painful for me because of the way she sort of rejected the things we stood for,” Benjamin admits. “I resented the way she worked with the military. Kevin always talks about getting to the root of the problem, and Marla chose to go with the Band-Aid.”

There were fights, recriminations. Conversations were strained for years. A few weeks before Ruzicka’s death, Benjamin says they had what was probably their best conversation. But the damage was done.

Says Benjamin, “We never quite reconciled over it.”

Leave My Child Alone

Some women trace their activism directly to their desire to leave the best possible world for their children. Megan Matson, founder of Mainstreet Moms Operation Blue (The MMOB) is one of these. The mother-of-three started down the path of activism during the presidential primary when, as a Howard Dean supporter, she noticed “how short-term everything is” in politics. The trend ran counter to her own habit of contemplating the future her children would inherit.

“Mothers think 20 years down the road — they have to be there,” she says. “With sustainability, for example, you have a great built-in audience with women, if you frame it right.”

The MMOB (formerly Mainstreet Moms Opposed to Bush) sprang from Matson’s disgust with the Bush administration and her conviction that motherhood is a “first identity” that unites women before political identity. The goal was to mobilize unregistered, likely progressive, single mothers to vote against Bush. Mother-volunteers signed up to do what they could in stolen snatches of time, and the group managed to send out 500,000 letters by November 2.

“A lot of women said what enabled them to do it was that it was guilt-free,” says Matson. “Do what you can, when you can do it.”

I meet with Matson and fellow MMOBster Felicity Crush at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where we sit outside and eat at chef Traci Des Jardin’s restaurant, Mijita. Matson’s 7-year-old son Satchel and Crush’s 7-year-old daughter Ella are in school as usual, and today is the rare day that Matson’s 4-year-old son Valent and 2-year-old daughter Cass are not in tow. For Matson it is quite a change from the usual hubbub that surrounds her when she goes to compose an email, make a phone call or do anything else.

“I’ve been in so many meetings where I’m in the back row so I can back out if she starts to cry,” says Matson, a petite brunette with braids and golden-green eyes. “The absurd irony of being the most mobilized to take action in my life — and the most motivated — and yet this being the most impossible time, is not lost on me,” she laughs.

But Matson thinks that’s just today’s price of admission. “There was this period of time where people were saying ‘no, I can’t do that’ and taking care of themselves,” she says. “I think that’s over. We just have to have these big messy lives and say ‘yes.’”

“I think kids benefit when their parents are whole people,” chimes in Crush, a pixie-cut blonde who was a sailor and activist with Greenpeace before settling down in Stinson Beach. “They like to be in our life rather than us in theirs.”

There are other advantages. Crush was elated a few weeks ago when Ella and a friend decided to hold a bake sale to benefit Guide Dogs for the Blind. “And they wanted to do it now, so we did it now, we baked these cupcakes and went down to the corner and they raised $18. I was so proud that she wanted to do that.”

The MMOB is now teaming up with Working Assets and ACORN to fight the No Child Left Behind Act by attacking what Matson calls its weak link, the clause that requires public schools to provide military recruiters with student lists in exchange for federal funding. Matson and Crush see this tack as a way to galvanize parents who would otherwise be too intimidated by the vast scope of No Child Left Behind to protest against it. The name for the campaign is “Leave My Child Alone.”

Which presents another irony to Matson, whose son Satchel occasionally orders her to stop working and come play. “He asked what I was working on, and I told him about Leave My Child Alone. And he looked at me like, ‘Why would anybody want to do that?’”

“So I had to find another way of explaining it to him.”

From Consumer to Citizen

The garden was loaded with meaning for Vicki Cosgrove. The little plot of land in her Castro Valley backyard, her first, was a place where she and her son Elliot, now 10, and daughter Taryn, now 18, could find themselves astonished by the simplest things. On several evenings that summer, it provided most of their supper, and they found themselves elated.

“It was symbolic of that whole transition, part of that two months where I was getting a sense of becoming a citizen more than a consumer,” she says.

Her family’s candy business, where she had worked part-time doing books, had gone under, casting her adrift. By the time the garden gave out in late 2003, Cosgrove, initially animated by antipathy for the Iraq war and a powerful faith in Howard Dean, had more than filled her empty days by signing up as co-chair of the progressive Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club in the East Bay. Now she’s on the steering committee for California for Democracy, an umbrella group that seeks to revitalize the Democratic Party and support progressive candidates.

She’s gone to meetings on average three or four nights a week — and Elliot doesn’t like that much. “When I’m leaving for a meeting in the evening sometimes he’s not very happy with me, but he understands what I’m doing is for him,” she says.

“I do tell him once in a while, ‘It’s for you, so you can grow up in the country I grew up in;’ that if these people have their way, they’re going to make sure all of us are dirt poor. And I don’t want that for him. It’s very real, and it’s coming right down. There’s such a blatant attack on the middle class: nurses, firemen, policemen.”

If she thought things would slow down after the presidential election, she was wrong. “People were scrambling” to keep the momentum going, she said, and only now are things stabilizing to the point where she hopes to be able to get some cleaning and laundry done on a regular basis. To complicate the emerging peace, her husband John — who worked for a different candy business — lost his job in mid-May, though he had an offer when we spoke.

“So we’re okay,” she says. “And I’m so wrapped up I just want to do this.

“I’m not sure I can say I was consciously motivated by making the country better for my kids,” she says after a pause, “but it became that after a while.”

Traci Hukill is a frequent contributor to Common Ground.

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